goodreads | The Fun Family - Benjamin Frisch

Title: The Fun Family
Author: Benjamin Frisch
Genre: Graphic Novel
Rating: 1/5
# pages: 240
Date read: May, 2016

Beloved cartoonist Robert Fun has earned a devoted following for his circle-shaped newspaper comic strip, celebrating the wholesome American family by drawing inspiration from his real home life... but the Fun Family bears some dark secrets. As their idyllic world collapses and the kids are forced to pick up the pieces, can they escape the cycle of art imitating life imitating art?

I received this book as an ARC in return for an honest review.

Let's get the good stuff out of the way first - I liked the style of the drawings in this, even if it did get difficult to tell Mike and Robby apart at times, and the mother's face had a weird shape.

There. That was it.

There was literally nothing I enjoyed about this comic. I kept reading it, under the assumption that it just HAD to get better eventually... but it never did. Instead it ended on an extreme low, that just made me push the book away in disgust.

Full disclosure - I don't know Benjamin Frisch, and have no clue if the Fun family is based on a newspaper comic strip of some kind. If that's the case, I can see Benjamin Frisch getting so tired of his own story, that he felt the need to write a book about their life going to hell in a hand basket, in order to get some sort of therapeutic release. That would make sense, and that would make the book make sense. It wouldn't make it any more enjoyable, but at least I'd understand what he was trying to do.

Instead what I got was a book full of dysfunctional adults and only marginally less dysfunctional kids. Until the very end, I'd sort of expected that the grandmother's ghost would help the family get back on their feet again, but instead she just introduced a whole new level of weirdness into their lives.

The parents were the worst though. They kept making bad decision after bad decision, leaving the kids to bear the brunt of it and pick up the pieces. I wanted to kick some sense into both the mother and father, for them to wake up and take responsibility already!

A deeply unpleasant book that I wouldn't recommend to anybody.